Business People: Stop falling for "founders have to code"

Wrong, but in an interesting way.

The number one myth about business people is they know how to build a business. No MBA will prepare you for the actual experience of turning nothing into a profitable machine.

Programmers don't know how to build businesses either, but they do know how to build something that might turn into a business.

That doesn't mean business people are worthless; all successful startups combine business knowledge and software knowledge. But in 2011, software ability cannot be outsourced in a startup. Increasingly, software can't be outsourced from any business.

The issue is, non-technical founders don't know what is easy and what is hard. They don't have all of the information necessary to make decisions about what does or does not go into a software business.

Are there any examples of successful companies where the founders aren't flexible enough to expand their knowledge of the other disciplines?

I'm not convinced that a successful team can be built upon a founding team with a technical founder that doesn't understand some sales/marketing and a sales/marketing founder that doesn't understand some code/tech.

For that reason I think this post is marching down the wrong path and is just as wrong as one which would state: "Technical People: Stop falling for 'founders have to sell'".

Obviously both need to be done as they're both pretty critical tasks. Someone on the founding team has to take ownership of each and to function as a team they can't operate in silos.

Without making a judgement on anyone's business skills, this just comes down to cost. If a business person can get a good programmer to build his idea, all the power to him, but hiring a poor programmer isn't likely to be much better than learning to build it himself, and would likely cost a decent bit more time and money. Someone who doesn't program starts with the disadvantage of having to rely on someone else from the get-go, and until there's at least a prototype, executing on the business side of things is likely to be pretty tough. Sure, it can be done, but why choose to give yourself that disadvantage?

Obviously a joke, but awesome.

"The programmer has a huge advantage now because he has delayed his competition by convincing them to learn an unfamiliar skill before breaking ground."

Love it.

This is wrong. Business people are trained to drive efficiencies within mature markets and established models. Founders are about discovering markets, which means adapting at light speed to new contingencies, knowing the code front and back, and being able to learn fast. If you're an MBA, by all means jump into the commanding heights and do your thing, but otherwise, hackers have to be the core.

No one says that all founders must code. The most anyone says is that the founding team must include a programmer.

Founders have to sell. ;)

Seriously, the code, methodology, and everything else comes second. Execution, which drives the sale, comes first. If you can convince your salespeople of how great the product is, then you're gold. Its a lot easier to sell something you know to be a better product than its competition.

For the first six months or so of a startup's lifecycle, it's all about building a product. If you can't build a product, you're overhead at best and a distraction at worse.

Perhaps we should stop labelling people coders and business people; that might be helpful.